Generally speaking, the content of a website may be composed by gathering a mix of content such as textual, image, video, hyperlinks, and applications—just to name a few. These various types of content may be gathered from a variety of sources and from many different third party software tools, such as web design programs. Web content that is created specifically for distribution through web sources, such as a website, may be created in utilizing, for example, a content manager explorer (CME).
Content authors may desire access to information related to the design of web content stored in other systems (e.g., the third party software) that they desire to make use of in the CME. Such an integration of third party software would require specific integrations of the third party software into the main CME and in some cases the core software used by end users to create, manage and publish web content to websites, also known as “CM.” Unfortunately, these types of integrations may restrict the number and level of integrations possible.
Moreover, most websites are comprised of a patchwork of functionalities created directly for the website. These functionalities may be included in a web application that is utilized to operate the website. Additionally, the functionalities may be derived from third party sources (internal and external). These third party sources may provide their own code (e.g., tag libraries or application programming interfaces) that must be run in the same environment in which they were created in order for the functionality to be completely rendered by the web application. If the third party sources are not run in the same environment in which they were created, the functionalities may not operate correctly within the web page. One alternative to this requirement is for the CME to allow the use of client side rendering through at least one of hypertext markup language HTML iframe elements and web services through AJAX or JavaScript integrations that may render portions of the web page once the web service data is returned by the web application. Unfortunately, these integration methods may make it difficult to clearly separate web services code from the actual web content. Moreover, web services that utilize, for example, .NET functionalities, may not be able to effectively render third party functionalities from other sources.